Artifacts (10 page)
Faye scrambled up the stepladder through the trapdoor and, once through, hauled the ladder up after her. She pulled the door closed, knowing that the enslaved craftsmen who built Joyeuse had fashioned it so well that, despite decades of neglect, it fit snugly and invisibly into its opening. A guest, invited or not, could roam the top floor of her house at will and never suspect that she was lurking above them in the cupola.
The tax inspector was willing to work on Saturday, which did not suggest that Faye could expect any mercy from that quarter. The inspector would arrive any moment to decide whether she should pay taxes on an undeveloped, uninhabited island, or on a twelve-thousand-square-foot island mansion. This day was bound to come. Now she would see whether she had planned for it successfully.
Her morning had been spent smashing each windowpane that wasn’t original to the house, being careful to do it from the outside in, so that shards of glass scattered convincingly across the floor. Her roof was absolutely tight, but she’d painted spreading brown stains across the ceiling in several areas. Damp blankets festered under the ceiling stains and inside the broken windows.
Faye had removed pins from selected hinges, allowing shutters, casement windows, even the front door, to hang askew. Finally, she loaded her camp stove, generator, and personal items in a wheelbarrow and carted them to the
Gopher
, which Joe promptly piloted far out to sea with orders to return only when the coast was clear. The twenty-first century had been wiped away, and the twentieth century had gone with it. Only the great house remained on the deserted island, playing the role of an impoverished dowager lingering at death’s door.
The work had been good for Faye. She was at her best when toying with bureaucrats, and mindless tasks were what she needed to drown out thoughts of the murders, of Abby Williford, of the goddamn taxes.
Faye’s vantage point gave her views in all four directions. She could see the tax inspector approaching in the boat that Wally had considerately rented to her at his special government price, which was about twice the going rate. Faye was gratified to see that the narrow entrance to the inlet where she moored her own boats was as overgrown and easily overlooked as ever.
The intruder passed it up, anchoring her boat just off Joyeuse’s tiny beach and hopping overboard. Faye focused her binoculars on the distant form and saw an intrepid-looking woman, wading ashore without giving her deck shoes or knee-length khakis a second thought. Damn. Faye had been hoping for a desk jockey in a business suit.
Faye watched the inspector walk slowly up the path, pushing back the weedy undergrowth. If it weren’t for this woman and the flock of people like her who wanted to take Joyeuse away, she could trim the bushes along the path. She could paint her house and put a real roof on it, instead of patching it with pieces of tin salvaged from a junkyard so they wouldn’t look too new. She could plant flowers in her own front yard.
The woman strolled into the dogtrot, an open breezeway that divided the aboveground basement into two equal halves. There was nothing to see there, just stone-like tabby walls that once enclosed the plantation office, the storeroom, the dispensary, and other service rooms a long-dead business had required.
Just as Faye was beginning to worry, the woman reappeared and stood studying the facade, clipboard in one hand and the other fist on her hip. The average bureaucrat would have given up at this point, because Joyeuse looked in no way livable, but this tenacious soul began climbing the grand outdoor staircase that had swept guests to the main floor to greet Joyeuse’s owners.
At least she hadn’t found the sneak stairs in the basement that had once brought servants to the dining room and, up another floor, to the master bedroom. It was vitally important that the inspection end before it reached the bedrooms.
It was in the bedrooms that the builders of Joyeuse achieved their highest art. They had ennobled every room in the house with moldings miraculously formed out of the materials available—mud, Spanish moss, horsehair, and Lord knew what else—and they had hung the hand-blocked French wallpaper on the main floor with delicacy, but the bedrooms flaunted Faye’s favorite embellishment.
Each square inch of the bedrooms’ ceilings and walls was covered with murals. Faye slept in a lavender chamber graced with swans and wisteria. A manly room across the hall, perhaps a guest room, depicted the climactic moment of a fox hunt. The master bedroom was a confection of flowers and painted lace, white on cream on ivory on gilded beige.
Faye’s grandmother had showed her how to clean the murals with a fine, soft paintbrush, just as her own grandmother had taught her. Five generations of care had left them marvelously preserved. Not content with merely keeping up the family tradition, Faye had gone the extra mile. She had taught herself to repair the cracked and faded areas of the paintings. Then, after studying
faux-bois
techniques, she had restored the painted wood grain to the doors, reversing a century of wear around the doorknobs.
If the tax inspector saw the bedrooms, Faye’s goose was cooked.
Faye grinned maliciously as the woman yanked at one of the oversized front doors. She had gone to great pains to disguise the main floor as a former haven for the down-and-out. Dirty sleeping bags lay in every cranny. Those that lay under “leaks” were both wet and dirty. In spots, the sleeping bag covers were shredded and the stuffing pulled out by—what? Mice? Rats?
Faye was frankly stunned to hear a footfall on bare wood. Its hollow echo told her that the inspector had braved the staircase. Faye was hardly willing to climb it herself, preferring the sneak stair or the outdoor stairs tucked under the rear gallery.
Joyeuse’s interior staircase was a freestanding spiral of singular grace, but it wasn’t aging well. It shifted perceptibly underfoot and the plaster that coated its underside was flaking away, clear evidence of motion beyond the architect’s specifications.
That very morning, Faye had removed several balusters to enhance its rickety appearance, yet the inspector was risking her life to climb it so she could harass Joyeuse’s tax-dodging owner. Faye hoped it fell, because she had only one more trick up her sleeve.
The footsteps kept coming closer and closer, climbing further up the spiral. The treads creaked under the woman’s feet and Faye could almost feel Joyeuse herself tremble and shift in sympathy. The footfalls stopped when the stairs ended at a square landing that served no purpose other than to provide access to the huge bedrooms hiding behind closed doors.
On this landing, Faye had pulled out the stops, evoking every stereotype she knew to convince the inspector that the tumbledown house was just a shell that luckless people used to keep the rain off their heads. Ratty clothes were tossed among discarded cans of beans and beer and Sterno. She hoped the inspector was writing “abandoned, uninhabited, and uninhabitable” on her clipboard. She hoped the inspector was doing anything other than reaching for the doorknob to one of the bedrooms.
For a long moment, there was no sound, no footstep broadcasting the intruder’s inspection of the squatters’ refuse, no turning doorknob, nothing. Then, there were quick footsteps as the woman stumbled down the deathtrap masquerading as a staircase, across the entry hall, and down the grand outdoor stairs.
Faye’s final, inspired trick had worked. Joe had been instrumental to her plan. She had left him in privacy to do the task and she imagined he had performed it with the glee of a small boy. She hoped he was as gleeful when she asked him to clean up after himself.
The coast was clear and it was safe for Faye to laugh out loud. The intrepid inspector had been scared away by the simple odor of urine.
Stuart was tired of walking into bars and walking out again, still sober. It was not possible that his targets had lingered long in this area without being seen by somebody, especially when one of the targets wore a feather in his long black hair. Maybe the people who had the information he needed didn’t drink, so bars weren’t the best places to look. Maybe they were upstanding, churchgoing folk.
Tomorrow was Sunday. Maybe he’d find himself a shabby suit at the thrift shop and visit some churches. Nah. He shouldn’t have to do anything that drastic. Bars are chockfull of churchgoing family people just looking for an hour’s peace. Bars are full of people who filled their cars at service stations and shopped for groceries and picked up the weekly dry cleaning. How was it possible that no one in this lightly populated corner of the world had seen the Indian guy and his young sidekick?
Stuart could see only two possibilities: either they were drifters who didn’t stay in the area long enough to make an impression on anyone but his client, or they lived someplace unusually secluded. If they’d drifted on, then they’d taken his chance at a fortune with them and he might as well go home and have a cold beer. It seemed more practical to assume that they were hiding in an extremely out-of-the-way spot and, if he could only find it, the money would be his.
Faye took a moment to enjoy being alone at the top of her home with a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the Gulf of Mexico and its coastline. She didn’t know when she’d last taken the time to crawl up into the cupola just to look around. The view was worth the climb. Her eyes were drawn to a scattering of dark patches in the aquamarine waters far to the southwest, like inclusions in an otherwise flawless gemstone. She’d had no idea that the Last Isles were visible from Joyeuse.
It was good to know that Joyeuse was safe and that she’d been the one to save it. Grounded by the feel of her home, old and solid beneath her, and soothed by the all-encompassing water, she sank down on a bench beside a floor-to-ceiling window.
When she felt rested, she stood up and looked down at the old storage bench where she’d been sitting. The words “old” and “storage” coalesced in her archaeologist’s brain and she lifted the lid. It was stuffed with old dresses—Depression-era, from the looks of the fabric. Interesting, but not earth-shattering. She wanted something
old
. She pulled the dresses out and found nothing beneath them but broken glass. It was thicker and clearer than window glass, but no more earth shattering than the dresses. Finally, in a back corner beneath a broken teacup, Faye at last found something
old
.
Ten thousand years old.
It was a long, distinctively fluted piece of stone. Faye gawked at the Clovis-style spearhead in her hand. Implements from the famous Clovis, New Mexico, site had been found in association with Pleistocene species; the Clovis people lived so far in the past that they hunted mammoths and other Ice Age animals. Could this point have been brought here by someone who bought it or collected it elsewhere? Or was there a Clovis site nearby? Artifacts of that age weren’t unknown in Florida, but habitation sites of such great age had proven elusive so far.
Holding something so ancient made the great house on Joyeuse seem new, a frivolous whim built by someone who thought he needed a dwelling much more grand than the ephemeral hut of the hunter-gatherer. When this grand house blew away on a puff of wind and water, the artisan who made the thing in her hand would live on in the poetry of its form and function.
She couldn’t wait to show this to Joe.
Stooping over, she pushed on the lever that activated the trapdoor’s latch. Nothing. She tried again. The mechanism tripped properly, but the door didn’t budge. Hanging on to a window sill so that she wouldn’t drop through the hole when the door finally opened, she stomped on the lever with all her weight. Nothing.
This was a sorry state of affairs. Perhaps, in a single hour, humidity had caused the wood of the door to swell an extra millimeter. Perhaps the house had shifted and the trapdoor frame was barely out of square. Perhaps one too many coats of varnish had been applied to the door and its frame, and they had bonded chemically under pressure.
Joe wouldn’t be back to the house until suppertime. Unless she planned to perch in the cupola until then, waiting for rescue like Rapunzel, she would be crawling over the roof.